Re: [PATCH] x86,mm: print likely CPU at segfault time

From: Dave Hansen
Date: Mon Jul 19 2021 - 15:58:36 EST


On 7/19/21 12:00 PM, Rik van Riel wrote:
> In a large enough fleet of computers, it is common to have a few bad
> CPUs. Those can often be identified by seeing that some commonly run
> kernel code (that runs fine everywhere else) keeps crashing on the
> same CPU core on a particular bad system.

I've encountered a few of these kinds of things over the years. This is
*definitely* useful. What you've proposed here is surely the simplest
thing we could print and probably also offers the best bang for our buck.

The only other thing I thought of is that it might be nice to print out
the core id instead of the CPU id. If there are hardware issues with a
CPU, they're likely to affect both threads. Seeing to different "CPUs"
in an SMT environment might tempt some folks to think it's not a
core-level hardware issue.

If it's as trivial as:

printk(KERN_CONT " on cpu/core %d/%d",
raw_smp_processor_id(),
topology_core_id(raw_smp_processor_id()));

it would be handy. But, it's also not hard to look at 10 segfaults, see
that they happened only on 2 CPUs and realize that hyperthreading is
enabled.

Either way, this patch moves things in the right direction, so:

Acked-by: Dave Hansen <dave.hansen@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>